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If this reasoning is valid, The Good has no scope whatever for
intellection which demands something attractive from outside. The
Good, then, is without Act. What Act indeed, could be vested in
Activity's self? No activity has yet again an activity; and
whatever we may add to such Activities as depend from something
else, at least we must leave the first Activity of them all, that
from which all depend, as an uncontaminated identity, one to
which no such addition can be made.
That primal Activity, then, is not an intellection, for there is
nothing upon which it could Exercise intellection since it is The
First; besides, intellection itself does not exercise the
intellective act; this belongs to some principle in which
intellection is vested. There is, we repeat, duality in any
thinking being; and the First is wholly above the dual.
But all this may be made more evident by a clearer recognition of
the twofold principle at work wherever there is intellection:
When we affirm the reality of the Real Beings and their
individual identity of being and declare that these Real Beings
exist in the Intellectual Realm, we do not mean merely that they
remain unchangeably self-identical by their very essence, as
contrasted with the fluidity and instability of the sense-realm;
the sense-realm itself may contain the enduring. No; we mean
rather that these principles possess, as by their own virtue, the
consummate fulness of being. The Essence described as the
primally existent cannot be a shadow cast by Being, but must
possess Being entire; and Being is entire when it holds the form
and idea of intellection and of life. In a Being, then, the
existence, the intellection, the life are present as an
aggregate. When a thing is a Being, it is also an
Intellectual-Principle, when it is an Intellectual-Principle it
is a Being; intellection and Being are co-existents. Therefore
intellection is a multiple not a unitary and that which does not
belong to this order can have no Intellection. And if we turn to
the partial and particular, there is the Intellectual form of
man, and there is man, there is the Intellectual form of horse
and there is horse, the Intellectual form of Justice, and
Justice.
Thus all is dual: the unit is a duality and yet again the dual
reverts to unity.
That, however, which stands outside all this category can be
neither an individual unity nor an aggregate of all the duals or
in any way a duality. How the duals rose from The One is treated
elsewhere.
What stands above Being stands above intellection: it is no
weakness in it not to know itself, since as pure unity it
contains nothing which it needs to explore. But it need not even
spend any knowing upon things outside itself: this which was
always the Good of all gives them something greater and better
than its knowledge of them in giving them in their own identity
to cling, in whatever measure be possible, to a principle thus
lofty.
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